Solid state battery design charges in minutes, lasts for thousands of cycles::Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new lithium metal battery that can be charged and discharged at least 6,000 times—more than any other pouch …
Before people jump in here to talk about how battery technology never comes to market… Every single one of these discoveries teaches us something new, sometimes it reveals tech that’s unsustainable, sometimes it’s un-manufacturable, but it always gives us another direction to look for things.
Tech goes relatively slowly from lab results to store shelves, so stuff you read about 10-20 years ago are what are in your devices today. This could very easily be the way that your phone runs in 2035.
This could be as game changing as lithium ion was back in the early 2000’s, or it could go the way of most lab results. We won’t know until we keep poking at it and figuring out what it is useful for.
Sure of course, and this was a good article, but I think it’s absolutely right to ream pop tech rags that pick these data up and make it sound like the battery revolution is right around the corner. It is important to couch this stuff in the fact that battery tech is operating on what appear to be fairly narrow margins and that reliable gains in efficiency are not likely within arms reach. There is an ocean of battery research and very little of it results in marketable changes without dozens of other breakthroughs needed to be made to make the new finds feasible. Curbed enthusiasm is appropriate in this field not journalistic tech hyperbole.
With batteries it’s usually a triangle of features: maximum current, capacity, charge cycles. And you can pick only two. Whole charging in minutes thing is not really an issue. Any battery can be charged fast if you can dissipate the heat fast enough. Also if capacity is low enough then would potentially justify charge cycles and fast charge.
Ok, I am interested in anyone with specific knowledge on this topic indicating whether the first order mental image I have of battery tech is correct?
The way I understand it is that the highest energy density batteries are your non-rechargeable lithium cells like watch batteries. Rechargeable lithium-ion cells have perhaps half the capacity due to the fact that they need to add measures that prevent these dendrites, as mentioned in the article, from forming. So the Holy Grail here is to develop a rechargeable technology that prevents the dendrite problem without sacrificing capacity so that you can get the best of both worlds? And that is what they are working on here with the solid state design. Am I close to the mark?
Lithium might be the lightest metal but it only has 1 free electron. Aluminum has 3 electrons per atom therefore theoretically it would have a higher density than lithium.
That’s great, but we won’t get it for another 10 or 20 years. So until then, it’s great, but pointless. Solid state batteries have been in the works since at least the early 2010s and we’re just now supposed to be getting the first iterations in electric cars in the next few years.
